


Where the Bodies Are Buried

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Epic Love, Episode: s15e20 Carry On, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27895894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: This is not the first time he's taken care of his brother's body. It's just the last.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 81
Kudos: 236





	Where the Bodies Are Buried

**Author's Note:**

> For me, the finale did its job: it gave us something true to the characters, and it brought me where I needed to be to say goodbye to this dumb show we've loved so much. But I'm me, and I'm slow, so apparently I had to have my feelings out loud for 8,500 words. Goodbye, brothers Winchester; goodbye, SPN. We'll never see the likes of you again.
> 
> Thanks to themegalosaurus and interstitial for the beta.

  
  
  
  
This is not the first time he's taken care of his brother's body.

It's a clumsy task. There's no getting around that. Even before and after rigor, corpses aren't easy to move. Really they're harder to move around than they should be, given their weight and dimensions alone; Sam's come to believe that's because of the mismatch of expectations with reality. When people look at an object, they expect it to move through space in one way. When they look at the human form, they expect another. Which is obvious on the face of it, yet hard to appreciate until the moment when human form becomes object.

It never enters his mind to take Dean back to the bunker. Upon clearing out of Akron, he drives until he's somewhere empty—somewhere not Ohio; somewhere there is no one to see—and then he keeps driving until he crosses a stream.

About a mile on from the stream, there's a side road. A couple miles up the side road, his headlights wash over a marker for a fire road. After a while the fire road stops, so Sam does, too.

He cracks the windows but otherwise ignores the dog, who is hunched on the passenger seat with his ears as far back as they'll go; he yelps when the driver's side door slams shut. The body's in the backseat. Sam lifts it out in a fireman's carry, just like their father taught them.

Dean's head dangles. That's something that gets Sam every time: a human head is the shape and weight of a bowling ball. Pick a body up when the muscles have quit softening the edges of what bodies really are, and all that's left to see is the external laws to which it was subject all along. If rigor has fully set in, it will move through space in much the same way as a table or a chair. If rigor hasn't come yet or has been and gone, things will flop and slump. It's not malicious; it's just the universe doing what it does. It's not undignified; it's just reality.

Outside the car, Sam straightens up and looks around. It's still dark. He can just hear water.

He points them both upstream and walks.

* * *

The second time he had to do this, he kind of improvised. 2008 was not a banner year for him even before the queen of Hell sicced a preternatural Rottweiler on his brother in an Indiana subdivision; the event itself didn't do his mental health any favors. When he got out of the car in a forest outside of Pontiac, it became suddenly and obviously apparent that he hadn't gotten too granular in the planning phase, inasmuch as he now had a shovel, an unrefrigerated corpse, and little else.

He built the box himself out of planks torn off a barn half reclaimed by kudzu. After he finished, and stood back, and looked at the thing, he rationalized that having it be easy to break into would be a feature, not a bug. Then he started walking into the woods with the box on his back. He walked like that for close to half an hour before he realized how dumb it was. By that point, it seemed pointless to start trying to do any of this the smart way now, so he kept going.

He had trouble thinking of the box as a coffin. Its purpose was not that of a coffin. A coffin had an end that did not apply in this situation; this was a container, a receptacle to hold a thing for a time. So it was just a box.

At last he came out of the trees and into a clearing. For a while he stood blinking up at the sky; then he set the box down and went back to the car.

The smell punched out the moment he opened the door. It was distinctive. He'd smelled it first in the dining room in Indiana, when the third or fourth swipe from the hellhound had perforated the bowel. After the first few hours driving, he'd pretty well acclimated to it, but it was getting him looks when he stopped at gas stations so he'd known for a while that he'd have to hurry up and find a place. He carried Dean out to the clearing.

Next he dug. The sun climbed until it reached down into the clearing, coaxing a scent pregnant with life from the soil he heaped up on the weeds. He finished, scraping and leveling the bottom of the hole, and planted the shovel in the pile. Exhaustion hit him then. The clearing was small, and the sun had gone behind the trees some time ago. He stumbled over a clod of earth and sat heavily beside his brother.

Dean was wrapped in canvas, which kept the smell down. Sam watched a line of ants going in and out of a fold at one end for a while. He laid down in the grass beside the body. It was still day, but in the shade and his own sweat, it felt cooler and later than it was. He shut his eyes, turning his face into Dean's shoulder through the cloth.

Sunset was dying around the base of the trees when next he woke. He got up and went back to the car for lanterns, and then he opened the canvas.

The body looked much the same as it had right after it happened, just slightly drawn in around the edges. Like one of those sacrificial slices of cake in a display case by the end of the day. Not too bad, really, as far as decomposition went. Other things were issues, though. He stared down at the body for a long time, and then he got ready to wash it.

He ended up using bottles of Deer Park and the sheet Bobby had stolen from the house where Dean had died. He'd given Sam this dark, furtive-challenging look as he'd stuffed the thing in the backseat, as if Sam didn't know what he wanted him to use it for but later he'd find it and a light bulb would go off; like, yes, of course, he could see it now, he needed to cremate his brother's body ASAP. The Laura Ashley florals had convinced him. Sam cut the sheet into bandanna-sized squares with his Buck knife.

Dean looked so vulnerable, laid out naked like this. Messy, too, of course, but somehow that stood out less than before. His thighs, his toes, his neck, his buttocks, his genitals, his viscera were all without protection. Sam had been the one to close his eyes; but looking at the body now, he had the overpowering feeling that Dean had done it himself to shut out the sensation of nothing left between him and the world.

The lanterns shone on Dean's skin as the day drained out of the air and shadows came closer, as if to warm themselves. Sam poured water over the torso and limbs in careful lines and caught it in the cupped strips of bedsheet. The first few passes like this, he really only got the blood smeared around more evenly. The copper stench bloomed in the moisture, competing with the smell from Dean's bowels.

Sam daubed damp cloth over the chest. Long, parallel furrows cut the skin into ribbons, and the edges of the ribbons were starting to pull in, exposing the depth of each cut. Bone showed at the bottom. The hellhound had clawed at Dean's heart but couldn't get past his sternum and ribs. Well; Sam imagined that it could have, with a little persistence, but it hadn't needed to. Dean had bled out elsewhere.

 _Stop it,_ he'd screamed at Lilith like a fool. _Stop it._

Bit by bit, he got the body clean. He managed to finish with about a third of a Deer Park bottle to spare, and made a mental note to go somewhere with running water next time he had to do this.

Clothes. Dean was going to need clothes. Beetles were nosing at the cuts in the abdomen when Sam returned from raiding the duffels in the car; he brushed them away and sat down in the grass next to the body. Jeans, boxers, t-shirt, button-down. He folded and refolded the shirts a few times. He stacked them in a tidy pile, jeans-boxers-t-shirt-button-down; then stacked the lower body garments on top of each other and the upper body garments on top of each other; then set them out side by side; then refolded them again.

Rigor was still present, so the limbs resisted when he dressed them. Sam had played Barbies with a friend from the first grade once, and could still remember the way the rubber knees bent and held position. This felt like that.

When he finished, he set the box in the bottom of the hold, hoisted Dean onto his shoulder, climbed down, laid him in it, and nailed the planks for the lid over the top. He filled in the hole, which went a lot faster than digging it. Round about sunrise, he nailed two wood scraps into a cross and drove it into the earth over Dean's head. "I'll see you soon," he said.

He never went back.

* * *

The first time was complicated.

Logistically, for the most part. He was too confused, too in denial, too busy crying ( _crying,_ for fuck's sake) when Dean actually died and stayed dead in that Broward County parking lot to move his ass until the cops were right on top of him. Shootings in populated places meant police. In the parts of town where he and Dean bedded down, response times were not swift, but sooner or later somebody would call and somebody would come. The world around him—even Dean himself in it—had felt so unreal for so long, though, that Sam didn't think of any of those things and, even when he heard the sirens, scarcely believed in them.

What it came down to was that he got away without the body. That was a problem. Making sure they found the shooter took care of the APB out on him and the car, but Dean was still in the county morgue. There probably wouldn't be an autopsy—cause of death was clear and Dean was a John Doe—but it couldn't be long before they disposed of his body altogether. Sam pulled up the Broward County Medical Examiner's website. It helpfully provided a table of fees: _Indigent Cremation: Cremation (indigent family) – $75; Cremation (non-indigent family) – $225; Storage fee (non-indigent family or the County Contracted Rate) – $150; County Administrative fee – $35._

The Broward ME's office sat immediately beside a five-pylon high-tension power line corridor, which made Sam curse. Not that EMF was at issue in Dean's case, but it was the principle of the thing. He cased the premises. The medical examiner worked nine to five; Trauma Services shared the building 24/7, but they kept to their side of it and the lone security guard did rounds on the hour. Sam let himself into the morgue via a service door next to the electrical room. Once there, he started pulling open cadaver drawers. There were only twelve; he got lucky on six.

He wasn't ready.

His whole plan had been: go in, pick Dean up, take Dean out, put Dean in the car, get Dean somewhere safe. (Safe. _Safe._ ) Just get him out, and then deal with everything else. Time mattered.

But Dean's face on the slab hit him like an uppercut. He didn't belong here. He didn't belong dead and he didn't belong _here_. Sam had fucked up and now Dean was in a place where he didn't belong.

Rigor was still present but well past its peak. The drawers were refrigerated, though, and although he'd known that, Sam wasn't really prepared. He reached out and hauled the corpse into his chest, and it was cold like a fucking supermarket turkey. Christ. Sam felt his face crumpling even as he tried to keep his breathing under control enough to get the job of hoisting his brother up over with. He failed. Not twenty-four hours after the clusterfuck in the motel parking lot, here he was, losing his ever-loving shit again.

The door opened.

When he'd entered, he'd only turned on one of the little fluorescent lamps over the morgue's counter; it shouldn't have been visible from outside, but it did illuminate the room. It showed important parts of the landscape like slabs and sheets and corpses and people. A very small middle-aged woman of South Asian extraction stood inside the door with a spray bottle of institutional cleanser in her hand. She and Sam looked at each other. The oak door, which had a pneumatic hinge, closed with a click.

Sam stood still. Well, Sam stooped still. He had Dean half in his arms, pulled up to sitting on the drawer tray. He'd been sobbing with Dean's face smushed into his shoulder through his t-shirt, which felt more or less like cuddling a saran-wrapped package of drumsticks, and the sheet had fallen into Dean's lap to give the cleaning lady a very clear view of his ass.

"I'm armed." Sam spoke in a rapid undertone. "Try to scream, try to run, and I won't hesitate. I'm not here to hurt anybody. I'm not here to _steal_ anybody. I'm just here for my brother. I'm taking him home, and I'm going to fix this. Do you understand?"

"I'm just here to wipe down the counters," she said carefully.

Sam swallowed. "Oh. Okay."

Neither of them moved. Sam _was_ armed, naturally, but he wasn't about to plug a janitor for his own reconnaissance failure. The noise of a shot would defeat the purpose anyway. At the same time, if she did run, he couldn't clear the distance between them before she made it out the door, because his arms were full of half a corpse that was poised to take a header into the tile.

Dean's body broke wind.

Sam jerked his head toward the industrial sink past the line of autopsy tables, the farthest point in the room from the door. "Go to the sink. Turn on the water." After a moment, she moved silently to do as he said. "Okay. Fine. Good."

He fished for the sheet and got it wrapped more or less around Dean, stealing glances every half second at the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady, for her part, politely turned to face the wall. Sam hoisted the body onto his shoulders.

"I'm going to leave now. There's a clock on the wall. Wait five minutes, then do whatever you have to. Don't move or call anyone before time's up. Not for my sake; for theirs."

She nodded. She had her hands up at her sides.

"Okay. I'm just gonna, um—"

He left.

With the body under a tarp in the backseat, he drove until he crossed state lines, and then he drove until he found a squat. He was somewhere in Georgia and it was light again—hard, golden morning that showed the ramshackle cottage clearly through waist-high grass and brambles. He parked around back and brought Dean, swathed in the coroner's sheet, in to lay him on a couch that had been left behind. Camel-backed, green olefin upholstery. Mice ran out at the impact.

Gently he unwound the sheet. The ME's office had already cleaned the blood off; probably with a hose, Sam realized, one of those hoses on springs over the sluice table. Like the faucets commercial kitchens had. He hated it. It didn't count. He'd have to do it again.

Kneeling on the floor next to the sofa, he closed his eyes and willed the world to start again, to start back, to start right or even in the nightmare before this one. Anywhere in the timeline that wasn't now. He called on the trickster. He prayed to it. When he opened his eyes again, Dean's body was still naked on an ugly sofa with a hole in its chest. Its lips were starting to pull back. The belly had gone alabaster green. His own handprints glared white against the lividity on the shoulders where he'd clutched the body to him in the morgue.

Rigor was completely gone now, and Sam's brain supplied the process behind that without any conscious effort: enzymes were breaking down myofilaments in the muscles that had locked up when starved of ATP. And before he could stop it, his brain also supplied a memory of the awful, flu-like full-body ache he'd felt when he first woke up after Cold Oak. It had taken hours to dissipate.

Sam stared at his brother's body for a while longer, but he didn't cry again. Not for months.

* * *

—a warehouse. Dean, his lips coated in blood, face battered to hamburger, pliant and positively lamb-like. As if all it took to beat out the primordial rage he'd taken on himself was one measly round with a budget angel. _I got something to say to you: I'm proud of us._

What a fucking asshole.

And Sam, clutching the back of Dean's head, crying (again), thinking on a loop: _What the hell happened to us?_

and

_Fuck you._

and

_You expect me to wash all this blood off? Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass that is?_

* * *

Sam knows a lot of things about his brother's body.

He knows that it is 186 centimeters long and weighs 82.5 kilograms when it's missing most of his blood. (It was on his toe tag.)

He knows that its palms sweat when Dean meets someone he considers a celebrity, but not when he's afraid for his physical safety.

He knows it has a trick left shoulder that can pop loudly enough to be a tactical disadvantage when the temp falls below about forty.

He knows that Dean, the fucker, does not have the gene for his toenails to turn black after long runs.

He knows Dean's right second toe is crooked but not his left one, and that it isn't an injury because it's stayed like that after every healing or resurrection he's had. It was still there when he got back from Hell. It wears small holes in the tops of socks.

He knows what his fists feel like. He knows how they land in muscle, in bone.

He knows the heft and curvature of his cock, erect or otherwise. He knows what it tastes like. He knows what it feels like inside of him. He knows that Dean's circumcision left a faint ridge, not scar tissue but a bit of texture under the glans. He knows what his semen tastes like. (Pineapple doesn't help.) He knows tonguing over his frenulum once will make his entire body jerk; doing it longer will make him twitch and start to lose his erection; and that holding him down and doing it for fifteen minutes solid will make him come, sobbing and spasming. He knows where to find his prostate. He knows what his pubic hair feels like snarled into his own.

He knows all that from the times they've fucked. They've fucked to try to drain off some of the intensity between them, to try to chase that intensity to some kind of natural conclusion, to try to make whatever they are make sense, to try to close the last little gap between them, to try to destroy themselves for good. It's never worked.

He also knows details about his genitalia that have nothing to do with sex and has since before either of them knew what sex was, because that's living out of a car for you.

He knows what age Dean was when his voice broke.

He knows what his sweat smells like in all four seasons in eight of the ten standard federal regions.

He knows what the cartilage in his throat feels like.

He knows that his colds always start with a mild sore throat followed by twelve to eighteen hours with no symptoms at all. He knows that acetaminophen brings down his temperature faster than anything else.

He knows how many drinks he needs to keep steady, although he doesn't know how many it takes to incapacitate him.

He knows that his boots wear out on the outside first (left faster than right). He knows what his feet smell like when he has athlete's foot.

He knows how long it takes his body to decompose.

Sam's back is killing him. He pauses to readjust the weight across his shoulders and then keeps walking. He needs to move.

* * *

"You never did say," said Dean, on one bed.

Sam, on the other, turned his head on the pillow. The room tilted a little. "Say what?"

"What it was like while I was gone."

Sam turned back to face the ceiling. "I told you."

"No, you told me some crap that happened; you told me what Ruby did. What was it _like?"_

"Why are you asking me this?"

"Because that's what you keep wondering about Hell, isn't it? Isn't it what you keep trying to get me to tell you? Isn't that what you want me to _open up_ to you about?"

They were both very, very drunk.

Sam thought, as best he could. He'd told Dean all the facts (save one) pertaining to Ruby, because Ruby was what Dean had asked about. Ruby was what he'd wanted to understand. The crossroads demon, the fifth of Blue Flame he'd put away to make himself enticing and that had nearly killed him anyway, the trade he'd tried to make—Dean was correct. Sam never did say.

This was the night after the children who'd lived in the walls. Both of them were a bit on edge.

Sam lubricated his throat with a pull off the whiskey on the nightstand (Old Crow, so a step up from the Blue Flame if a rickety one). "What do you want to know?"

"I already told you, now answer the fucking question."

"What do you want me to say?" Sam bit out. "You were dead. What do you think it was like?"

"It was Hell. What do _you_ think it was like?"

Sam balled his right hand, the one Dean couldn't see, into a fist at his side.

"I get it," Dean said when Sam didn't answer. "You needed somebody. Well, why not Bobby? Why not Ellen? Hell, why not St. Louis Becky?"

"I wasn't about to drag them into this."

"Drag them into what? I thought you were saving people right and left. Safely. Completely bloodless."

Sam burst out laughing.

Several seconds later, when the walls finished their agitation cycle and he felt himself settle back into his body, he started over on sifting the layers of Dean's not-question. He thought about how they got here, why they were on their second bottle, and called to mind what Dean had said earlier when they'd stopped for a lunch he didn't eat. "You wanna know if I enjoy it like you did," he realized—out loud, unfortunately.

Dean stiffened. "Forget it."

"I thought we were past this. She helped me. Does that bother you so much?"

"She's a demon, Sam. You have no idea what that really means."

The reminder brought Sam shame, the worst shame he had in him; but there was anger there, too. "I've been possessed, Dean."

Dean floundered (fucker really forgot) but recovered. "Then you should know better. If you've had one of those things inside you, how could you think taking fucking Jedi lessons from one wasn't bad news? How could you think that was anywhere in the realm of all right?"

"You were dead. You were in Hell. What the fuck makes you think I cared?"

Sam wasn't drunk enough to say, _I know I can't imagine what you went through, but I tried every day._ He was very, very drunk—close enough to alcohol poisoning to remember what he used to feel like all the time before Ruby got to him—but not quite far enough gone to tell Dean, _I imagined you suffering. It was easy, after the amount of time I spent with your corpse._ He didn't say, _I imagined you screaming; I imagined you begging for help that never came. The only time I stopped imagining it was when I started working with that demon you hate so much and I believed, even though she told me not to, that I was going to bust you out. Then someone else did it._

What he did say was, "Did you ever call for me?"

There was a pause. Then Dean said, "No. Never."

They didn't talk at all after that.

* * *

"Ow! Jerk!"

"Back off, Sam!"

"I just need it for a second!"

"Too bad I'm using it and it _isn't yours!"_

"It isn't yours, either!"

"Oh, yeah? Who fixed it after you broke it? Like you always do?"

"I _didn't."_

"Liar."

"This speech is coming on in two minutes and the report's worth one whole quiz grade—"

"And you're too chickenshit to miss a quiz? Well, that explains a lot."

A pause. A strike.

"Oh, no you don't—"

"Just let me—"

"Damn it, Sammy!"

The car slammed to a halt.

Sam's palms hit the back of the seat when he was thrown forward. He could see both his and Dean's eyes in the rearview mirror; they were huge in the dark. He could also see their father's face.

Dad let off the brake and eased them onto the gravel shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was level. "Stop it. Both of you."

Dean's expression reminded Sam of the very last time he had wet the bed, years ago. "Sorry, Dad."

Sam's eyes flicked from Dean to the portable radio he held. (He never even glanced at the car's.) "But—"

Dad didn't answer. He just shut his eyes and inhaled, fingers tight on the steering wheel. He still had ichor under his nails. Sam shut up.

"I swear to God, you two could play chicken with each other in the same car." Their father breathed out, unclenched his fingers from around the wheel, and opened his eyes. He didn't turn around. "You won't understand this now," he said to the windshield, "but you are going to want to make some fucking peace with your brother. One day, we're going to finish this. One day all of this shit will be done, and you'll have lives of your own, with wives and kids and houses and bosses, and there won't be anybody anywhere in all of that who you can talk to like your brother. He's the one who knows where you came from. He's the one you won't be able to lie to. He's the one who knows your shit stinks and will help you clean it up anyway. He's the one who knows all the crimes, and he knows where the bodies are buried."

This was the longest speech Sam had ever heard his father make about anything. Dean, too, probably, which might have been why they both stared at the driver's seat in silence until Dad put the car in gear and nosed her back onto the road.

Half a mile later, he added, "Metaphorically, too, of course."

* * *

At last Sam arrives at the stream. He follows it until he finds a clear place and lets Dean down onto a bank of moss. The air is predawn gray, showing incrementally more of the surrounding world from one minute to the next: trees, water, the thicket he just walked out of. The sun isn't rising yet, but it will, same as every day.

He uses his knife to cut away Dean's clothes this time. After the hellhound, he took them off normally even though it was a pain in the ass and every garment had to be burned; but this time there is no point nor any room for pretending otherwise. He strips his brother's body with efficiency born of practice.

_Did I ever tell you, that night I came for you when you were at school—? I must have stood outside your dorm for hours._

If Dean was there as long as he said, he would have seen Jess make spaghetti to soak up all the Halloween shots. He would have seen her turn in soon after. He would have watched Sam study for an extra hour before he, too, went to get ready for bed; he would have watched him strip down from hoodie to overshirt to t-shirt to skin.

There's the scar over Dean's flank that almost made his left kidney a thing of the past. There's the tan line between foot and ankle. There's the age spot on the back of his hand he'd never admit wasn't a freckle. There's his tattoo. There's the mole between his shoulder blades. There's the wound that got him.

_Let me look at you. Yeah, there he is._

Sam probes the entry point for information. It doesn't matter now, if it ever did, but he can't stop wanting to know exactly where and how something hurt his brother. He can't turn off a lifetime of reconstructing events in his head to try to inhabit all the ones he wasn't a part of. The rebar went in to the right of Dean's first lumbar vertebra at about a forty-five degree angle. It missed the lung, hit the liver, definitely destroyed a kidney, never made it far enough to pierce his heart, but probably finished up in his inferior vena cava.

That would explain the look on his face. People know when they're dying. There's a whole-body certainty that comes down; Sam has felt it himself, most clearly after the clusterfuck with Nick, on a slippery patch of asphalt next to the car. In the barn, his brain frittered away whole seconds rejecting obvious information precisely because it recognized that look.

All of that is just Sam's best guess as to the specifics of how Dean died. He could open the body up and check. He thinks about it. Between the number of bodies he's dissected and the number of times he has been, he would be able to make very good estimates of what happened, what it felt like, and how much it hurt. But that wouldn't really tell him what he wants to know, any more than unmaking Alastair and Lilith lifted the shame of failure. It doesn't let him crawl inside and occupy it until it's his experience, too, so what's the point.

_I'm not leaving you. I'm gonna be with you, right here, every day._

Sam sets Dean's watch and ring on a rock to be out of the way.

Sometimes he thinks there's no way they'd be as close if it weren't for hunting. There's a certain intensity level doing something potentially lethal day in, day out with somebody will inject into any relationship. Once, the two of them were arming up out of the trunk, tossing rounds and weapons to each other, checking magazines, testing blades. They finished and turned at the same time, and their eyes locked. The whole interaction couldn't have lasted more than a second, but Dean looked at Sam and dropped a kiss on his machete like a gambler kissing dice, and warmth flooded Sam's groin.

Hunting has never meant the same thing for Sam that it has for Dean, not least because the times he's actually done as Dean urged—give in, let go, _enjoy it_ —terrible things have resulted. It's meant never trusting himself and always holding back; it's meant too much loss and too little redemption. But it's also meant moments like that one, matchless. Hunting gave them that. And he can't fool himself that it's only the chance of dying themselves that made whatever passed between them there. Gambling their own lives is an adrenaline rush, but it's not that other, honeyed, _sacred_ thing. The sweetness came from gambling with each other's. Sam's not sure it was ever really about sex, but it is a kind of lust.

Other times he thinks hunting was only ever incidental. Somewhere in the last few years, they mellowed into companionable domesticity (sort of), and Sam took up meditation, and Dean started applying for jobs, and they were free, and they discovered to their shock that intimacy is a thing apart from vehemence; that the fear that drove them for so long—that if they didn't love each other violently, they wouldn't love each other enough—was needless.

_Oh, man. I did not think this would be the day._

When he's done stripping the body, Sam strips himself. Their clothes go in a neatly folded pile on a patch of ferns, and his watch joins Dean's on the rock. He steps down into the stream and picks Dean up by the underarms.

Dawn is just now happening, and the water's cold. The stream isn't wide, but there's a sizable, flat rock in the middle and a hip-deep pool in front of it where eddies have carved out the stream bed. Sam carries Dean to the rock and begins to wash him.

 _Stay with me. Can you stay with me, please?_ Rare that Dean pleaded; Sam doesn't think he'd ever seen Dean plead for himself. He was scared, reaching out for comfort, and Sam was so afraid to touch him that he barely did. His big brother died, and Sam didn't even really hold him because he was afraid. The water flows over Dean's face and sweeps back his hair.

When the body's clean, he carries Dean back to the bank, climbs out, and puts his clothes back on. He sits down next to his brother and closes his eyes for a minute.

In the barn, he was afraid to speak the way he was afraid to touch. That one's just as well, though. _Stop it; I'll get the first aid kit; I'm supposed to wake up_ : he always says the dumbest shit when his brother's dying.

_It's good. It's good._

He opens his eyes and Dean's still dead, and that's too much after the day he's had, really it is.

Sam looks at the Buck knife in his hand. It was a gift. He should get moving on building the pyre, considering it's going to take most of the day, but he can't make himself get up. The meditations he does are always telling him to notice things without judgment. Ferns are getting his ass wet. His head still hurts from where he got knocked out; his balls are drawn in from the dip in forty-degree water. He looks at the blade, really sees the shape and texture of it in a way he hasn't before.

 _No bringing me back, okay? You know that always ends bad._ Has not bringing him back ended much better?

It's cold and Dean's body is naked, although the skin doesn't form gooseflesh, of course. In the mornings now Dean always wears a robe and slippers whenever they're not on the road. When they go to Jody's, Claire snarks about seeing fluffy slippers on a rugged hunter who's staked out more nights in wind and rain than a mall cop has Victoria's Secret displays; but Sam knows it's because Dean has weathered so many nights like that that he needs the little comforts now. Being rugged is tough on the body. It's tough on a lot of things.

 _No bringing me back, okay? You know that always ends bad._ Dean's said it before and it was a lie then; what's to say it isn't a mistake now?

There's a driver's tan on Dean's left forearm. Sam bit him there once, in a supermarket when he was seven. Sam, that is, not Dean, who was old enough to yell a rafter-rattling "shit!" that got the store manager on Dad's case and Dad's belt on Dean's butt. Dean vehemently pointed out the unfairness of this. Dad turned to Sam, told him to drop trou, and gave him five; then he turned back to Dean and gave him two extra for ratting on his brother. Sam then got three for gloating. Then they didn't talk for a week. Then Anthony Barth made fun of their dad for working nights at a loading dock, and they put the betrayal in the dairy aisle behind them.

 _No bringing me back, okay? You know that always ends bad._ It's the closest thing to an apology for Stanford that Sam will ever get; it should be enough, but it isn't. It's the closest thing to an apology for _it means you're a monster_ that Sam will ever get; it shouldn't be enough, but it is. Is it forgiveness for Amelia? Is it forgiveness for Flagstaff? Is it forgiveness for _you're holding me back_? Does Sam even want it if it is, when he fights every day to forgive Gadreel? He tries to meet his brother's eyes over the blade, but they're closed.

The worst thing about bodies freshly dead is that they breathe. It isn't real, of course. It's just air in the lungs finding its way out when the body's shifted—removed from a hook in the wall, say—but it _sounds_ like breathing. If Sam had to pick a number one personal least favorite thing about dead bodies, he'd pick that.

_I need you to tell me that it's okay._

Sam buries the knife in his brother's heart.

It takes him a minute to loosen his fingers around the hilt, panting. The knife went so far in that the crossguard is dug into the skin, but there is, of course, no bleeding. Sam blinks, and water hits Dean's chest. He curls up on the ground and shakes.

When he's done enough of that, he rolls onto his back and stares up at the sky. It's blue up there, beyond the tree branches. This day never had a moment where the sun broke over the horizon and lit everything up. It just trickled steadily in, and now it's full light.

"I don't _want_ to do this without you. I don't want to do any of it. I don't want to hunt without you, I don't want to forgive you without you, I don't want to make it all up to you without you, I don't want to live without you. I don't want to. I don't _want_ to."

The things that come out of his mouth at times like this aren't just dumb, but childish.

Well, one more for the road: "It's not fair."

Dean's the one who knows where he came from, all right. He's the only and the last. From now on, every town he comes to, he's the stranger. He rides in a stranger and rides out no less of one. Once Sam would have paid everything he had for that kind of fresh start; once, he very nearly did. But he thinks now that even if evil had never come to find him and no matter how much he'd loved and been loved, it would always have been slightly hollow. Because Dean knew all the crimes, those done by them and to them, and loving the innocent is cheap.

He can hear what he'd say about it: _We've burned more bodies than we've buried, anyway._ Sam snorts.

He turns over. The knife drove clean through the sternum; it isn't easy to pull out. Red shows through the opening left behind, but none spills. He holds himself up on one elbow and watches his brother's face. A knife through the heart hasn't disturbed its peace.

Sam bends down and kisses the wound. He moves his lips against it for long seconds before he draws back. "It's okay," he says softly.

He killed himself a few times after Lucifer came to him, though of course none of them stuck. He's felt a little guilty or embarrassed about it at points, but before now, he never felt the real magnitude of his attempted transgression: dying without his brother there. He's lucky Dean's more merciful than he is.

Sam looks at his knife and finds no interest in it. Suicide is easy enough after the first time; but it'll take him a lifetime, at least, to feel what he has to.

* * *

The logistics really sucked this go round. He had to find the kids the vamps took, which wasn't easy because they were hiding in a field and when he discovered them, they ran. He never did convince them he was safe, he's pretty sure. The corpse in the backseat can't have helped.

After the kids were delivered, he had to make a stop back at the room because that was where they'd left the dog. Lebanon to Akron was a fifteen-hour drive, and they did not have neighbors they could ask to pet-sit. That had been Dean's whole argument as to why they couldn't have a dog for, like, eight years. Now they had a dog anyway, so he went where they went; he went where they went, so Sam had to go and retrieve him. Like the kids, Miracle rode in the front. Unlike the kids, he could smell. He smelled it on Sam the minute he walked into the room.

While they were driving, Sam stopped at an abandoned gas station at a rural crossroads. A dog required stops, and places where no one was around to wonder what was under the tarp in the back were preferable. Cropless fields stood in all three other corners; whatever had caused the gas station to be built, it was long gone. Miracle jumped down and headed for a patch of grass some distance away as soon as the door was open.

The station had two chrome pumps under an awning that advertised _GAS & FOOD_ in a mid-century brush stroke font; the pumps had no means of accepting payment, only mechanical volume meters. The building itself was sea foam green clapboard with a single-car service booth affixed to it. All the windows were broken.

The sun shone down on the glass spread over the dirt in front of the place and lit it up, the most dazzling thing around for miles. It was beautiful. Sam stood and just looked at it. He couldn't believe how beautiful it was.

* * *

Miracle goes ballistic the moment the car door opens. Sam slides down against the side of the car while the dog licks his face frantically, begging for forgiveness with his whole body for whatever made Sam shut him in and abandon him. Sam doesn't have the heart to push him away; he just closes his eyes and waits it out.

After that, and after they've both had something to eat, he fetches the hatchet out of the trunk and cues Miracle to follow. While the dog stands guard over the body, he begins the search for wood.

Sam built his first pyre when he was fourteen. A buddy of Martin's bit it, Dad never did say from what, and they brought the body back to the cabin where they'd planned out the hunt and left the kids behind. Sam and Dean went out to meet the truck and shut up after one look at the occupants. Dad directed them to start cutting small-diameter logs, the drier the better; the two of them got hatchets and worked for a couple of hours in silence. Then Dad told them to build a platform and lean poles around it to make a chimney, and they did it side by side. Fuel went under the platform. The adults brought the body and laid it in position; it was already wrapped, so whatever the guy's end had been like, Sam and Dean never saw. Sam wonders now if their father did that, and if so, if he did it for them. He wonders if it was kind.

They got the pyre done pretty quick, working with four people. John poured the kerosene. The men said some words. They all stepped back and waited. Martin was grim, but he didn't hesitate.

Contrast all of this with Dean. Sam knows Bobby did. He wasn't there to hear what the older man may have said to his brother about it, but he knows what was said to him after the hellhound, and he can extrapolate. He has a pretty good idea of how comfortable the most tolerant person in their lives was with the Winchesters' approach to each other's dead bodies.

When the pyre is done, he goes back for rope and the winding cloth. He and Dean figured out how to do this part together, when it came time to burn their father. He thinks he remembers how.

Digging, stripping, washing, winding: Dean never had to do any of these things for his brother. He carried a body for a while, but Sam woke up wearing what he died in, mud included. It isn't the same. At the back of his brain, for the whole interval between when Dean came back from Hell and when Sam went, Sam wondered if that had something to do with the rift that kept widening between them. Not that he was masochistic enough to voice the thought and hear Dean list all the reasons he didn't need anything so convoluted to explain his discontentment with Sam, but the thought was there. How could Dean walk around knowing what Sam had done for his body and not hold a grudge? How could that not come between them?

He sets the cloth and rope beside the body and stops. Dean's hands lie at his sides, his belly undefended; his face is relaxed. The only mark visible is the one in the middle of his chest. Sam reaches into his back pocket and takes out a little brass face. He breaks the cord, kneels, and using his thumb and the full strength of his shoulder, pushes the amulet into the knife wound. Then he begins to wrap the body. Piece by piece, Dean's form disappears.

* * *

Sam remembers a farmhouse when he was nine. It was structurally sound, but it was one of those places where the paint had weathered off down to bare boards on the outside. Each of them had his own bedroom, though, which was pretty amazing; Dad's on one side of the house, facing the drive, and Sam's and Dean's next to each other, looking out over the field in the back. Sam pinned paper constellations to his ceiling; Dean hung a copper coil motor he'd built from a rafter by fishing line.

One night Sam woke. There'd been no noise, the house hadn't settled, he didn't have to pee. He just woke. The window, which had no curtain, was flooded with silver light.

He went and drew up the sash. The moon wasn't even full, but it shed bright, even light that showed the world as well in its way as day would. The backyard sloped down and away in a sea of colorless grass until it ran into woods; the moonlight outlined the crowns of the trees over that darkness and showed a blank ribbon of road winding through it. It was mild. There were hardly any clouds.

About five seconds later, Dean's window opened. Sam didn't move from where he knelt with his elbows on the windowsill. He wasn't surprised his brother was awake at the same time as him, he remembers that.

They both looked out over the world in silence for a while. They'd done some good stargazing here, but there was no chance of it on a night like this. "I finally got that radio working," Dean volunteered eventually.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Try to get some baseball."

"Okay."

A mild _clunk_ later, and a radio staticked to life, turned down carefully low.

Some oldies music and a few sports-like sounds came through as Dean searched up and down the spectrum, but none of the stations would quite come in. From one they caught what might have been a garbled _Cal Ripken_ ; Dean went back over that patch. "Wait, what's that?" Sam asked.

"I dunno." Dean sounded curious, too. He tuned the radio a bit more, slowly cycling through frequencies, and suddenly the snow dropped away and a woman's voice came in clear.

_"Zero, four, five, eight, nine. Seven, three, six, zero, two."_

They listened for several seconds; the woman repeated the numbers, then began to do so again.

"What _is_ that?" Sam asked again. "Has to be a code, doesn't it?"

"Maybe. Can't be a phone number."

_"Eight, two, five. Eight, two, five. Zero, zero, zero. Eight, two, five."_

"Zero couldn't be a letter, though." Sam was disappointed to realize it.

"It couldn't be a code like that, anyway; if it was, it would just be, like, 'aefijhdgac.'"

"I guess you're right. What do _you_ think it is?"

"I dunno," said Dean. "Maybe the government."

Sam considered this possibility. The woman kept speaking in the same calm, pleasant voice. "Do you think it's supernatural?"

_"Six, three, nine. Six, four, one. Zero, zero, zero."_

After a minute, Dean shook his head. "Nah. No. Just weird."

"Huh." They listened to the numbers repeat again. "That'd be kind of cool, though."

"If it's the government?"

"If it's not supernatural. If it's just… weird. Just 'cause."

"You're weird," said Dean, without rancor.

_"Zero, zero, zero—"_

Dean switched off the radio. "Batteries are going."

They both leaned their chins on their forearms on the windowsills. It was very quiet and very still.

"It's kind of weird not sleeping in the same room as you," Sam admitted.

"Is that why you're awake?"

"No; it's just weird."

"Don't worry, I can hear you snore just fine through the wall."

"Ha, ha."

They watched the patterns the clouds made on the field below as they passed over the moon.

"I'm going to bed," Dean announced finally.

"Okay."

"Are you?"

"No, not yet."

"Okay. Well, don't let Dad catch you."

"I won't."

* * *

There's a couple at 141 Timbercrest Lane in Austin who have been chosen by a werewolf. They have a son who looks about three years old. The couple don't make it, but Sam tells the boy to run and hide. After, Sam goes upstairs to look for him. He hears crying coming from inside a wooden toy chest. It's good workmanship, solid maple, personalized with a child's name.

The letters on the lid say _Dean._


End file.
